Bud Selig

February 17, 2009

So the story out of New York is that A-Roid called up Sports Illustrated's Selena Roberts to apologize for his comments during his admission that he used "banned substances" from 2001-2003. Roberts, of course, broke the story that A-Roid had tested positive in 2003 for steroids and was subsequently called "lady" and "stalker" by the Yankees' third baseman.

Stay classy, A-Roid.

Certainly the Yanks' third baseman will hear a bunch of questions that he will dodge on Tuesday when he reports to camp in Tampa. Some of those will likely be a little less friendly than the ones he heard during the ESPN interview where he made his admission.

Speaking of ESPN and easy questions, the ESPN ombudsman, Le Anne Schreiber, wrote in her regular opus that Hall-of-Fame baseball writer Peter Gammons didn't quite duplicate "Frost/Nixon" in his interview with A-Roid.

Well... yeah. Think the Yankee wants to make things difficult for himself? Isn't that why he took steroids in the first place?

But the most interesting bit of info coming out of the sports scene was that NFL commissioner Roger Goodell agreed to take a 20-25 percent pay cut this year because he believes it is necessary considering the state of the U.S. economy. If the NFL is going to continue to thrive, Goodell indicates sacrifices need to be made.

Moreover, Goodell will subject himself to a pay freeze after the pay cut to further illustrate his point. Oh sure, the NFL commissioner will be eligible for a year-end bonus, which will likely be ample, but that's not the point. Instead, Goodell is the rare guy in sports who at least pays some semblance of lip service to the idea of sacrifice in dire times.

At the very least, Goodell's decision paints him in a much different light than his counterpart in Major League Baseball. According to the Sports Business Journal, Goodell's soon-to-be shrinking $11 million salary is the second-most among the commissioners in major U.S.-based pro sports. MLB's Bud Selig is far and away the highest paid commissioner, taking home an $18.35 million yearly income.

February 04, 2009

Good for Manny Ramirez. Good for him for standing up to the power structure in Major League Baseball and telling them, "You think you can buy me with $25 million? Ha!"

"Ha!" he says.

So yes, kudos to Manny Ramirez for not allowing the Los Angeles Dodgers to reduce him to a dollar sign. There's more to Manny than the money, like... well... he's good at hitting a baseball and he has a unique hair style. Yeah. Not everyone can hit a baseball or grow interesting hair, so Manny has that going for him.

Which is nice.

So why is the fearsome right-handed hitter trivialized with dollar signs? Why do they insist on turning the great game of baseball like it's some sort of business?

Manny is an artist and he's above such trite things like contacts and millions and millions of dollars. He just wants to play the game and show off his skills. He wants to entertain and dazzle us with his pure swing.

Twenty-five million dollars? Who has time to be bothered by such trivial non-sense?

Manny's agent Scott Boras knows this. It's a good thing the hitter has someone like Boras on his side looking out for his best interests, too. After all, could Manny fend off those jackals in those sharp suits and sensible shoes working for the Dodgers who want to give him $25 million to play baseball in 2009? Probably not. The way those guys throw around money and push and bully hardworking folks like Manny around, it's a wonder he doesn't wake up next to a horse head.

So when the Dodgers came calling with the contract and a Brinks truck, Boras just laughed. Maybe he chuckled. He definitely guffawed. Later, he smirked just thinking about the nerve of those suit-wearing folks in the executive offices in Chavez Ravine. C'mon, $25 million? If Boras was getting a 10 percent cut of his client's cash, that left a mere $2.5 million.

Really...the nerve!

But let's try this one out for size - maybe Manny is a revolutionary. Maybe he is looking out for the proletariat. You know, the hard-working, lunch-pail middle American. And so to show solidarity with the backbone of America, Manny, a son of immigrants who grew up in Manhattan's hard-scrabble Washington Heights section, proves he can't be bought.

Twenty-five million dollars? Go fly a kite.

Boras, in a conversation with the LA Times, called the $25 million offer a, "Suggestion." In fact, it was an even bigger slap in the face than the two-year, $45 million offer the Dodgers sent to Manny in November.

It's as if the Dodgers and the rest of the franchises in Major League Baseball are trying to tell Manny something. At least that's what his pal Albert Pujols said during a press conference last week.

"I speak with Manny every three days and he tells me, 'Man, no one wants to sign me,' Pujols said. "I'm not an agent or general manager, but I can't understand how Manny has not signed."

Boras says he expects to have a deal in place by the time spring training camps open on Feb. 14, which will further stoke the speculation. Will the Mets wade into the fray despite the fact that the team's brass say publically that they aren't interested? Hey, why not? Manny is from New York so it could be a sweet little homecoming for him. Better yet, Newsday's Wallace Matthews suggested that the Mets could take the cash from CitiBank earmarked for the new stadium-naming rights and just hand it over to Manny. Since CitiBank is suckling at the ample bosom of the federal government for a fat, $300 billion bailout from you, me and every other taxpayer, it's nice that we can help a fella down on his luck find a job.

Hey, times are hard. The U.S. lost 522,000 more private-sector jobs in January, which is down slightly from the 659,000 jobs that were lost during December of 2008. Oddly enough, some of the numbers figured into the December total come from, coincidentally enough, Major League Baseball. You see, MLB decided to start a new television network on Jan. 1, 2009 so had to trim a little fat. As such, 30 or so folks who were working on the MLB web site were sent packing because, according to one report, they were making too much money.

You know, like $50,000 to $60,000 per year.

So in order to launch the network and to sign big-name stars like Bob Costas to wax philosophic, a dude writing stories for the web had to go. MLB gets its talking heads and Costas and whacks Ken Mandel.

Talk about a steal.

But wait, here's the good part... not only did MLB have to make those jobs cuts to restore order to its bottom line, it also had to make sure commissioner Bud Selig got his. Like we said before, times are hard. MLB only had $6.5 billion in revenues last year and not a dime came from taxpayer bailouts. Plus, Selig was paid $18.5 million in salary last year and not one single person ever went to the ballpark to see him.

Not one person ever.

So let's call Manny a Robin Hood in reverse. If the Mets swoop in to sign him with CitiBank bailout cash, it would be like stealing from the poor to give to the rich. You know, Reaganomics.

But Selig and MLB are bracing for the tough times and the rocky economic road ahead. With soaring ticket prices in places like the new stadium in New York coupled with the new network and a potential big check to be cut for Manny, Selig's company might slump to an even $6 billion in 2009.

"We're living in unprecedented economic times," Selig said at last month's owners' meetings. "We're trying to understand what it means."

To be fair, it won't take John Maynard Keynes to figure out this economic riddle. For as long as possible the pigs will feed whenever they want, for as long as they want.

So yeah, why shouldn't Manny turn up his nose at $25 million even in a time when jobs are being shed like hair on Telly Savalas' head? If Selig is stealing getting $18.5 million, maybe it's right that the economy should collapse.

January 17, 2008

In the interest of full disclosure and with the idea that Big Brother (or at least George Mitchell) is watching or that everyone else is into that whole cleansing of the conscience thang (yes it's a thang) after being accused of being a doper, I decided that I'm coming clean. From now on whenever I write about the Mitchell Report, USADA, WADA, Rep. Waxman, or perhaps even baseball, I am going to submit my morning performance-enhancing buffet.
Here's what it took to get me going this morning:

20 ounces of Turkey Hill diet green tea - since it tastes like it's loaded with chemicals and has no green tea flavor whatsoever, I figure it's on the IOC list of banned substances. While we're at it, does anyone remember the old Turkey Hill iced tea and good it tasted? Of course that was back in the good old days when Turkey Hill was a local dairy and neighborhood "minit market" and not a soulless corporation.

I also had a banana and some pad Thai with tofu from Trader Joe's, but tofu is hardly an enhancer.
Anyway, the point is that if a Congressional subcommittee wants to question me or pick on me for one reason or another, I'm ready. I have witnesses, too, which may or may not have been a good deal for Bud Selig, Don Fehr and Major League Baseball. You see, these days Congressional committees convene for the sake of moral proclamation - kind of like Senator Geary's grandstanding in The Godfather when he got it on the record that America has no better friend than the Italian-American community.
And then he excused himself so his colleagues could attempt to bust up his sugar daddy.
Bud Selig, Don Fehr and Major League Baseball are used in the same manner by Congress. They are easy pickings - a moral carwash if you will. Whenever Congress members are feeling low or their conscience is bothering them, who better to call in than the dirtiest bunch of dudes around? Even more than Alberto Gonzalez or the current group of criminal minds in the executive branch, Bud Selig is the best verbal punching bag out there for the moral miscreants on Capitol Hill. It's gotten to the point where Bud doesn't even fight back any more - he just sits there as if he's a character in a Biz Markie song and takes it.
When asked by Rep. Mark Souder, R-Ind. if they were "complicit" in fostering the culture of drugs that has defined this era of Major League Baseball, Selig and Fehr shrugged the affirmative. Yes, they said, there is a lot of blame to go around. Both men accepted and conformed that their legacies will essentially be defined as the drug era - one in which the results must be set aside in order for the game to maintain its cherished historical perspective.
Speaking of perspective, the best of that lot and perhaps even the most indicting of Selig came from Rep. Betty McCollum, D-Minn., who stated, "Fixed games played by drug users that illegitimately altered the outcome of the games. It's my opinion we're here in the middle of a criminal conspiracy that defrauded millions of baseball fans of billions of dollars."
Can you say, "Class action suit?"
Better than that, McCollum asked if there really was any difference between baseball, Britney or pro wrestling? But that's the million-dollar question isn't it? For some reason sports fans have it buried into the locus of their minds that their form of entertainment is on a higher level than other elements of the entertainment business. It's like they are evolved or advanced or something because the carry a stick and whack at a ball instead of watching a movie or digging the latest dish.
They can't all be the same can they? No, of course not.
But that didn't stop McCollum from asking:
"If baseball is simply another form of entertainment like going to a concert or attending a professional wrestling match, in which an audience attends solely for pleasure and they do not attend under the presumption of some form of fair athletic competition, then there would be no difference between Barry Bonds and Britney Spears.
"But in fact Major League Baseball is sold as a legitimate competition. ... This demonstrates to me fraud to millions of baseball fans."
Did Major League Baseball knowingly allow players using illicit substances play in games in front of paying customers? Yes. Yes they did. Is it consumer fraud? That's for the lawyers to decide, but at the very least it's very mean to present juiced up ballplayers as authentic and ask hard-working families to shell out big money.
It's very mean.
And that leads us back to Bud, Don and Congress and Tuesday's dog-and-pony show. The point is we get the point. We don't need grandstanding or televised hearings in the place of revenue-generating TV shows to know that drugs are bad and kids copy the things that pro athletes do.
But until baseball and the players' union decides to take the lead to develop proper testing - as opposed to more investigations and witch hunts - Congress is going to keep calling in Bud and the gang for more checkups. Yeah, there are more important things to do and sure, they can pick on someone their own size, but Congressmen and women like knocking them out of the park, too. In this case Bud and Don are throwing the meatballs to the juiced up folks in Congress.

August 07, 2007

Bud Selig arose out of his seat only when it seemed conspicuous not to do so. Still, he gathered himself slowly like a petulant teenager who was told by his parents to go take out the garbage or worse, give his over-perfumed and plump aunt Tilly a big hug a kiss right on her peach-fuzzed jowls.

But then Selig did something really amazing that can only be described as an act of defiance that could fairly be measured as a modern-day version of Tommie Smith and John Carlos giving the gloved fisted Black Power salute at the Mexico City Olympic Games in 1968.

Selig jammed his hands in his pockets.

The only thing he could have done to top his non-acknowledgement acknowledgement would have been to stretch his arms as far as he could into the soft, night-time air in San Diego’s Petco Park and give an obnoxious yawn. But really there was no need for a yawn. The rest of us did that for the commissioner.

A reluctant stand from his seat at the ballpark followed by shoving his hands into the pockets of his trousers was how Bud Selig, the man at the helm of baseball’s so-called Steroid Era, reacted when witnessing home run No. 755 by Barry Bonds on Saturday night. Around him the fans appeared to react similarly as the commissioner in that they weren’t really sure how they should react. Some cheered, perhaps not for the man who hit home run No. 755, but because they got to see something that people would talk about or talk about how no one cares – an odd little irony that seems to follow Selig’s game (and all sports) like a lost puppy.

Others, of course, booed. But even that seemed as if it was out of some sort of duty rather than true disdain for the guy who hit the homer to tie Hank Aaron’s record. Really, what do the fans in San Diego care about the assault on Aaron’s record? It’s not as if Padres fans are like the baseball zealots in the Northeast where the game was created and the numbers accumulated during a routine baseball game are viewed as sacrosanct. Yankees fans care. So do Red Sox and Phillies fans.

Padres’ fans? Yeah, it’s a nice night out and maybe they’ll even play “Hells Bells” when Trevor Hoffman comes in for the ninth. Padres’ fans? They taunt Mr. 755 with signs depicting neatly stenciled asterisks. That’s clever and makes a point, but it’s hardly defiant.

But that’s the thing, no one really seems angry that Hank Aaron’s all-time home run record is about to be surpassed by an admitted steroid user (and yes, grand jury testimony in which one says that he used the cream and the clear is an admitted steroid user). Nor does anyone think it’s kind of funny that the guy who served up No. 755, Clay Hensley, was suspended as a minor leaguer for testing positive for steroids.

No one really knows what to think about the whole home run mess. Apathy and outrage seem equally trite, but perspective about what home run No. 756 and beyond really mean escapes us. ESPN, the network that carried the game late Saturday night, didn’t have its top team calling the action. Instead of the inscrutable and annoying ramblings of Chris Berman, Jon Miller or Joe Morgan, former pitcher Orel Hershiser and play-by-play man Dave O’Brien spent most of the middle innings dumping all over the milestone, baseball during the steroid era while detailing why it was hard to be excited about No. 755. However, the duo attempted to do right by ESPN, the corporate partner of Major League Baseball, by reminding everyone about due process and the fact that there has never been a positive drug test on one man’s climb up the charts.

Grand jury testimony or no grand jury testimony.

Clearly, Aaron’s new co-home run leader had no realistic perspective on No. 755.

“It just feels weird,” he said. “Alex is going through it right now. Each time gets tougher. I don't know what to think right now. I just don't. It's just a weird thing right now.”

Actually, Alex, as in Alex Rodriguez who became the youngest to 500 home runs just a few hours prior to No. 755, isn’t going through it right now. Alex, after all, doesn’t have the threat of indictment hanging over his head.

Yet through it all the commissioner of baseball stood there with his hands in his pockets. The only man to witness the only two 755th home runs in the history of baseball looked as if he would have preferred to be anywhere else.

July 12, 2007

Not much to report about the Phillies aside from the fact that the second half opens up tomorrow when defending World Champion St. Louis Cardinals come to town. The fact also remains that the Phillies need to add some pitching if they are going to make a push after the Mets, but they are in a very large club in that regard.

Everyone needs pitching.

It also seems that there could be a shortage of ash bats as well. According to a story in The New York Times a scourge of Asian beetles – called the ash borer – has wreaked havoc on trees in the northeast and could, as some scientists predict, wipe out the ash tree used to make baseball bats from the region.

Needless to say, this is an important development. If Selig is successful in spearheading the research for an HGH test it could define the legacy of the man who presided over baseball during its so-called Steroid Era.

***Speaking of creating a legacy, it was quite an eventful day on the road from Chablis to Autun in Stage 5 of the Tour de France. Italian Filippo Pozzato won the 113-mile stage which featured the first major climbs of the Tour, but that was an afterthought in light of what shook down in wine country today.

What everyone is talking about now is that the pre-race favorite, Alexandre Vinokourov “hit the floor,” in the words of Phil Liggett, with approximately 15 miles to go in the stage. According to reports, Vinokourov says the chain on his bike popped off and then he was cleaning himself off the floor.

Then it got interesting. As Vino dusted himself off and got back on his bike, the TV cameras zoomed in on his shorts where some big-time road rash showed through on his right hip/buttock. Also evident were some nasty cuts and bleeding on both knees that required a trip to the hospital where he got stitched up for some wounds that went all the way down to the muscle.

Nevertheless, Vino’s Astana teammates all dropped back – except for overall second-place rider Andreas Klöden, who was left to fight for himself in the peloton – to help the team leader rally from a more than two-minute deficit to close to within 75 seconds in the end. Despite that, the damage had been done. Vino fell to 81st place and 2-minutes, 10 seconds behind, while nursing some soreness and sporting some stitches as the mountain stages loom. Next comes Stage 6, a flat ride from the medieval Semur-en-Auxois on the Armancon to the suburban Bourg-en-Bresse at the base of the Alps. This one will be the last flat stage until late next week.

Still, perhaps the road isn’t so daunting for Vinokourov. Known as rider without fear and unafraid to take risks, Vino comes from Kazakhstan, which when it was part of the USSR was the place where the government tested nuclear bombs. According to Daniel Coyle’s entrancing Lance Armstrong’s War, Vino’s parents were chicken farmers in Petropavlovsk, but it was never something the cyclist ever talked about. In fact, when he first arrived on the professional riding scene Vino never talked at all except to say:

“I will ride hard today. The hill is not steep. I will attack.”

And that’s exactly what he did. Jonathan Vaughters, the former pro cyclist turned leader of the American Slipstream team said in Coyle’s book, “It’s very understood in the peloton – [he] doesn’t have anything to go home to. Sprints, climbs, descents – [he is] never going to give up, and will go all the way to the edge because [he] just doesn’t care.”

The other interesting development in Stage 5 is the hard-riding je ne sais quoi of overall leader, Fabian Cancellara. Some close observers of the Tour suggested that Cancellara’s days in the Yellow Jersey were coming to an end after Stage 4 as the sprint specialist met the first ahrd climbs of the race. But when the action got hot in the final kilometers of Stage 5, Cancellara was right there battling it out with the rest of the peloton.

June 16, 2007

When I was a kid and went to ballgames, I used to grab piles of the All-Star ballots and punch out those cards. Sometimes I sent them in, other times they just ended up in the bottom of a drawer somewhere.

Either way, I voted. Early and often. And no, I was never one of those kids who voted just for my favorite players. Back then I was a numbers guy and used that as the criteria in which a player merited an All-Star selection.

Yeah, I know, so silly.

Anyway, I still see those All-Star punch cards on display at the ballpark and always resist the urge to pick up stackfuls. These days those ballots are such an anachronism – an old-time relic of the 1980s when something as pedantic as cable TV was seen as innovative. These days, the core of All-Star voting takes place on the Internets where the ballot box can be stuffed by overzealous fans and interns working in the teams’ office.

But not here. No way. The All-Star Game determines which league gets home-field advantage in the World Series. You know, since Bud Selig and the league office have figured out baseball’s performance-enhancing drug problem they can focus on which the hardcore issues like which team gets to host Game 1 of the World Series. He has to do it because the idea of rewarding the team with the best record in the regular season is just so far out there.

OK. While rambling through the Internets last night I figured it was time to vote for which players I thought deserved an All-Star nod. Here they are:

***Speaking of Selig and showing the fans who is boss, MLB is still battling over who owns such public information like statistics produced from acts performed on a wide swath of grass in front of 50,000 spectators and countless others watching at home.

Along those lines, I ran 15 miles yesterday and I did it on public roads… do I own the statistics from that run or does Selig and the gang want a piece of that, too?

How about the neighborhood wiffle ball game? Little Jimmy hit a bunch of home runs and made a couple of nice catches near the bushes next to the driveway… can he use the term "home run" or is such a statistic “intellectual property?”

***Meanwhile, reports are that Selig wants to suspend Jason Giambi for not cooperating with the toothless Mitchell Investigation into baseball’s drug problem. You know, because Giambi said, “I was wrong for doing that stuff.”

In other words, Selig is telling the players, “Tell the truth and you will get in trouble… now go tell the truth.”

***Here’s one for the Phillies fans that keep harping on the signing of Jose Mesa:

Do you think the Phillies really wanted to sign Jose Mesa? Stop and think about it for a second…

May 31, 2007

Typically, Memorial Day is a significant milestone during the baseball season. As the days begin to get hotter and the cooler evenings are spent with a game glowing from a TV fans finally can gauge what they are watching.

Is it a team that is going to keep one’s attention through June, July and the Dog Days of summer with the hope of late-night games in the autumn? Or is a team that is better left for the days when one simply needs to watch a game?

Here in Philadelphia it appears as if the Phillies will keep the collective interests piqued past Labor Day. Whether or not that results in games around Columbus Day or closer to Halloween is still to be determined.

But away from the everyday minutia and rhythms of the team trying to end a 14-year playoff drought is the historical. You know, the types of things that occur once in a lifetime or perhaps once every quarter century or so. The things that baseball fans as well as the larger fabric of the sports’ world deems significant enough to place one of those “Where were you when…” plaques on the memory.

They happen so rarely. In my lifetime I can remember Pete Rose breaking Ty Cobb’s record for the most hits in September of 1985. Then there was Cal Ripken Jr. breaking Lou Gehrig’s unbreakable consecutive games streak in September of 1995. I was too young to remember Hank Aaron slugging home run No. 715 in April of 1974, but there is a good chance I’ll be in front of a laptop, television or at the ballpark on the day Barry Bonds surges past Aaron with No. 756.

Having had the chance to watch Bonds come up through Arizona State on rebroadcasts of college games during the early days when ESPN was digging for programming to fill the spots between episodes of Vic’s Vacant Lot and Dick Vitale, to his blossoming to a perennial MVP in Pittsburgh, this should be a major event.

Should, of course, is the operative word.

Yet like a lot of folks who follow baseball closely and even the most casual of fans, Bonds’ ascent to become the all-time Home Run King is more of a nuisance than significant event. It’s more spectacle than a historical event. Just like most fans I don’t know if Bonds surpassing Aaron should make me angry or just join in with the chorus of yawns that seem to be echoing from every spot on the map outside of the seven square miles surrounded by reality called San Francisco.

Certainly the debate over the importance of Bonds’ taking over the home run record is better served in the hands (and brains) of smarter people than me. That much is evident. So too is the reaction that Bonds will receive when he arrives in Philadelphia with the Giants for the four-game series to be played at Citizens Bank Park this weekend. Certainly Bonds will hear louder boos than J.D. Drew ever heard in his travels to play against the Phillies.

Nevertheless, instead of summer where baseball fans should rally around a significant milestone in the long history of the game, they have decided to ignore its biggest villain. Warranted or not, Bonds has slipped through the sports’ fans consciousness until he shows up in their hometown. Then they come out to boo.

But then again, even the commissioner of baseball says he hasn’t decided whether or not he will be on hand to witness the crowning of the new home run king. That, in itself, is odd. Since Bud Selig is presiding over the game during the so-called steroid era, he should be there when its poster boy breaks one of the game’s most sacred records.

It’s also possible that Bonds will inch closer to the record, too. Standing at 746 as of this writing, computer projections indicate that the record will fall before Independence Day. But unlike the Framers who gathered in Philadelphia on that sweltering day in July of 1776 whose place in history was never in question, it doesn’t appear as if Bonds’ legacy will be liberated from the clutches of public doubt any time soon.

“Our chief goal throughout the process was to ensure that fans would have access to as many baseball games and as much baseball coverage as possible,” baseball chief operating officer Bob DuPuy said. “With this agreement, the MLB Channel will launch with an unprecedented platform.”

Speaking of savvy, MLB commissioner Bud Selig made approximately $14.5 million in salary and bonuses in 2005. That puts him up there with the likes of Gil Meche and Ted Lilly. Be that as it is, Selig’s commissionership as been as interesting as any since Kennesaw Mountain Landis first held the post in the 1920s. For one thing, MLB has seen an unprecedented growth in terms of attendance, revenue, the value of the franchises, new infrastructure and television dollars. More people around the globe are watching the game than at any other time in history.

That’s all very good.

Yet at the same time, while the world tunes in fewer groups of Americans are watching than ever – namely kids and African-Americans. According to popular sentiment and columnist/talk-show fodder, Selig has reigned during a time in which MLB has “lost a generation” of fans. Kids, apparently, have tuned out in favor of the NFL, NBA and whatever other types of technology rules the day. They have chosen to play those sports, as well as lacrosse, hockey and soccer, instead of signing up for the baseball team.

At the prep school across from my house, the structure of the athletic fields has changed exponentially over the past decade. Several of the baseball diamonds have been re-configured and re-lined as lacrosse and soccer pitches as the game seems to have less of a grip on the kids coming up. At least in the exurbs, it appears as if baseball has become a bit of a fringe sport like hockey and the other so-called “extreme” sports.

Are these issues simply a matter of MLB being short-sighted and ignoring its future fans and players by televising World Series games at 9 p.m. on school nights? Or is it something deeper?

I don’t know.

Aside from those issues, Selig seemingly buried his head in the sand as performance-enhancing drugs issues went from a concern to a scourge rendering the league’s records meaningless and its history with little context.

Other than that, every day fans seem to enjoy the wild card and interleague play. So they have that going for them…

October 25, 2006

* If I’m not mistaken, commissioner Bud Selig took the “boys will be boys” approach to the controversy regarding Kenny Rogers and his dirty hand during Fox’s pre-game show. In an on-the-field interview with the always-entertaining Penn alum, Ken Rosenthal, Selig said that if Tony La Russa didn’t do anything about it, why should he?

Selig said that La Russa has been known to be combative.

What Selig and player’s union president Donald Fehr were with Rosenthal for was to announce the new labor agreement that will last through the 2011 season.

Selig called the new deal “historic.” You know, like the Treaty of Versailles.

* Kevin Kennedy, one of Fox’s pre-game analysts with a penchant for dismissing everything controversial in the game, was on top of his game on Tuesday night. This summer he debunked all steroid and performance-enhancing drug accusations and controversies with a hand waving, “He never tested positive!” As well as, “Put your name next to it! Stop using unnamed sources!”

OK, Mr. Haldeman.

Much to our surprise, Kennedy was just as dismissive of the Rogers controversy.

“It happens all the time,” Kennedy said. “It’s part of the game.”

Could you imagine what Kennedy might say if he were in Uganda with Idi Amin when people just started disappearing.

“What? It’s no big deal. It happens all the time. That’s just Idi being Idi.”

Yes, I see how silly it sounds comparing a brutal, homicidal dictator to a baseball pitcher with dirty hands and an apologist announcer. Better yet, it reminds me of one of my favorite Tug McGraw quotes.

After escaping from a tough, late-inning jam against the Big Red Machine's Joe Morgan, George Foster, Tony Perez and Johnny Bench with his typical aplomb, Tug was asked by a reporter how he was able to stay so cool. “Well,” he said. “Ten million years from now, when the sun burns out and the Earth is just a frozen snowball hurtling through space, nobody's going to care whether or not I got this guy out.”

My favorite Tug quote is when he was asked what he would do with the money he got for making it to the World Series with the Mets in 1973.

* I had Nate Robertson on my rotisserie team this season, Game 3 was the first time I saw him pitch. He’s a lefty… imagine that. He wears glasses, too. He’s also No. 29 like 1968 World Series hero Mickey Lolich and has been driving the same car for a really long time.

At various points of the season, I also had Jason Isringhausen, Anthony Reyes, Jason Marquis, Preston Wilson and David Eckstein of the Cardinals, as well as Pudge Rodriguez, Craig Monroe, Brandon Inge and Sean Casey of the Tigers.

* I had the chance to tune into the radio broadcast of the start of the game while running an errand. ESPN radio’s Jon Miller and Joe Morgan handle the call on radio, which is filled with much more insight than the TV version.

Yeah, I know a lot of people are not fans of Morgan’s work for ESPN, but there were a few nuggets from Morgan and Miller that the more superficial TV broadcast would miss.

This is no fault of TV, I suppose. After all, if someone is listening to the World Series on the radio they are seeking it out. A non-baseball fan isn’t going to drive around and listen to the game, though that same non-fan person could tune in on TV. You know, maybe the batteries on the remote died or something.

Anyway, Morgan and Miller pointed out that Preston Wilson could be the key for the Cardinals in Game 3. The reason? Wilson is in the No. 2 spot of the batting order, one place ahead of Albert Pujols. It would be Wilson’s job to ensure that the Tigers cannot pitch around the fearsome Pujols.

Yet because Wilson is hitting ahead of Pujols, the duo pointed out, he should get a lot more pitches to hit than if he were batting in front of, say, Jim Edmonds or Scott Rolen. Plus, they said, Tony La Russa likes for someone with some power to hit ahead of Pujols in the No. 2 spot. That’s why Wilson is so important, the announcers said.

This is interesting, though if La Russa likes power in the two-hole, why not try Edmonds or Rolen there. Certainly they both have much more power than Wilson and strike out a lot less, too.

* In the first inning after Robertson came up and in to Pujols, Morgan made a joke.

“Looks like that one slipped. Maybe he needs some pine tar?” Morgan said.

“He plays for the Tigers,” Miller said. “I think I know where he can get some.”